MB Civic

By Derrick Z. Jackson | May 6, 2006 |  The Boston Globe

DESPITE FIVE decades of Kermit the Frog, amphibians and reptiles remain low in cuddle quotient, outside of the occasional girl who has a pet iguana (like one of our Venture girls who brought hers to our scout meeting this week) or the boy there who catches snakes (like my youngest son and several of my rural cousins used to do). It does not matter that one of the most amazing woodland melodies at this time of year comes from the chorus of the peepers.

Kermit sings that it is not easy being green because he blends in with so many other ordinary things, which means people tend to pass him over. I do that myself as my spring mornings in nature never start off with looking for frogs. But true to Kermit’s proclamation that he’s green and ”it’ll do fine, it’s beautiful,” many a morning has ended with the frogs and toads.

Once, on a bog in Maine, after my neck could take no more of looking at nesting great blue herons and their chicks, I was transfixed by frog after frog on lily pads. Last year, after an hour of watching a pair of nesting woodpeckers frantically go in and out of a tree cavity on a pond in the Catskills, a friend and I paddled until we came upon a little cove dotted with more than a dozen American toads. They ballooned their vocal sacs to unleash a chorus of trilling sounds for mating and claiming territory. We stayed an hour in nature’s symphony hall.

Last weekend, I was at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, legendary for the birds in the treetops. As the morning warmed and the birds retreated, I looked along one of the ponds. Several bullfrogs lined the muddy edges. One frog was particularly captivating. Its green body and bright golden eyes turned just perfectly into the sun to show a beautiful reflection of an eye in the water just below.

With what is happening to frogs and toads, it was easy to wonder if the eye was watching to see what we do to their survival.

This week, the World Conservation Union released its 2006 Red List of 16,119 species of vertebrates, invertebrates, plants, and fungi that are threatened with extinction. A third of frog, toad, and salamander species are threatened. In a study this year published in the journal Nature, researchers concluded that global warming has dramatically accelerated the spread of diseases among frogs, especially in the tropics. It is believed that two-thirds of the 110 species of harlequin frogs in the American tropics have died out in the last two decades.

”We establish that global change is already causing the extinction of species,” the researchers wrote. ”Taking our results and recent findings that tie the same losses to disease, we conclude that climate-driven epidemics are an immediate threat to biodiversity.”

Back at Mt. Auburn, the sight of the frogs lining the pond might make the threat seem remote. That could be a temporary illusion, said Chris Leahy, the chair of natural history at the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Whether the cause is a global-warming-inspired fungus, artificial stocking of trout for anglers, pesticides, or suburbanization, frogs are disappearing where they once thrived from Midwestern farms to national parks.

”Most of our frog species in the Northeast are still quite common and that tends to be a problem to generate concern for them,” Leahy said. ”There’s still a lot of bullfrogs, peepers, and green frogs. But we may be heading to a situation where something that was once superabundant is now merely common, and with frogs, you don’t know when they suddenly might become rare.”

The lead researcher on the study in Nature, Alan Pounds, has said, ”Disease is the bullet killing frogs, but climate change is pulling the trigger.”

For five and a half years, President Bush claimed he needed to wait for ”sound science” on global warming — to the disbelief of most sound scientists. This week, his climate change program finally admitted that there is ”clear evidence of human influences on the climate system (due to changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols, and stratospheric ozone).”

Bush has yet to react to that by actually joining the fight on global warming. It was not easy being green for Kermit the Frog because it meant being overlooked. The real frogs and toads perch on their pads, balloon their sacs, and stare at us with their golden eyes. There is no more time to pass them over.